About

I’m professor of Media Studies at University of Turku. My work revolves around internet research, affect inquiry and critical sexuality studies while also broadening to media history,  materiality and pornography. I have just wrapped up  the consortium, Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (2019-2025, the Strategic Research Council at the Research Council of Finland) exploring different vulnerabilities connected to data culture.

My recent book-length projects have been perhaps too many. Objectification: On the Difference Between Sex and Sexism with Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, John Mercer, and Clarissa Smith (Routledge, 2020) is an accessible book exploring the uses, meanings and limitations of the notion of objectification in the humanities and social sciences, and written with students in mind. Meanwhile, Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media with Jenny Sundén (MITP, 2020) examines feminist forms of laughter through the lens of the absurd, and was a joy to write. In the making for a decade, Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MITP, 2021), less of a joy to write, counters broad Zeitgeist narratives connected to contemporary media. The investigation continued partly in Technopharmacology with Joshua Neves, Aleena Chia and Ravi Sundaram (University of Minnesota / OA with Meson, 2022) where my section examines diagnoses of online porn addiction. Meanwhile, my anally researched pandemic film historical inquiry, Yul Brynner: Exoticism, Cosmopolitanism and Screen Masculinity, came out from Edinburgh University Press in 2023.

Our coauthored book with Jenny Sundén and Katrin Tiidenberg, Hot Connections: Why Sexual Platforms Matter, is forthcoming with MITP in March 2026, and our book with Becky Holt on Pornhub is under contract with Polity for the Digital Media and Society series. I’m also writing a more experimental book on cursed images, affect, and tweeting with Elena Pilipets for the Institute of Network Cultures and developing a monograph together with Mari Pajala and Laura Saarenmaa on the first out mainstream gay celebrity in Finland, Monsieur Mosse.

I’m an advisory/editorial board member of the journals Sexualities, New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Porn Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Postmodern Culture, Dialogues on Digital Society, Capacious, MedieKultur, Monstrum, Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, POLI-Politiques des Cultural Studies, Cinémas, and Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. I can be reached at <suspaa(at)utu.fi>